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A Quest to End Spending Rules for Campaigns

WASHINGTON — James Bopp Jr. likes to begin speeches by reading the First Amendment. He calls opponents, including President Obama, “socialists.” He runs a national law practice out of a small office in Terre Haute, Ind., because he prefers the city’s conservative culture.

And for most of the last 35 years, he has been a lonely Quixote tilting at the very idea of regulating political donations as an affront to free speech.

Not anymore. Mr. Bopp won his biggest victory last week when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions and nonprofit groups have the right to spend as much as they want supporting or opposing the election of a candidate.

Mr. Bopp was not present in the courtroom. His client — not for the first time — replaced him with a less ideological and more experienced Washington lawyer when the case reached the justices.

But it was Mr. Bopp who had first advised the winning plaintiff, the conservative group Citizens United, about using its campaign-season film “Hillary: The Movie” as a deliberate test of the limits on corporate political spending. And he shepherded the case through appeals to the Supreme Court as part of a long-term legal strategy that he says he has just begun.

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he said in an interview. “And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”

“We have been awfully successful,” he added, “and we are not done yet.”

The Citizens United case “was really Jim’s brainchild,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“He has manufactured these cases to present certain questions to the Supreme Court in a certain order and achieve a certain result,” Mr. Hasen said. “He is a litigation machine.”

The same week the court issued its ruling, it agreed to hear Mr. Bopp’s next appeal: seeking to prevent the public release of the names of people who signed a Washington State petition opposing same-sex marriage, on the ground that gay rights supporters might harass them.

For Mr. Bopp, it is a chance to chip away at some of the disclosure laws left intact by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case.

Then there is his suit on behalf of the Republican National Committee, pending in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, seeking to overturn some of the limits on direct corporate contributions to the political parties. When Mr. Bopp filed it a few years ago, many legal scholars considered the suit almost pointless because of Supreme Court precedents. But the court’s opinion last week — from a slightly different set of justices — has cast it in a far more favorable light.

“If you cannot ban corporate spending on ads, how is it that you are allowed to ban corporate contributions to candidates?” asked Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Columbia Law School. “That is the next shoe to drop.”

Photo

Attorney James Bopp in his office in Terre Haute, Ind.Credit
Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times

Mr. Bopp, for his part, said he had no complaints about being removed from the case before the Supreme Court, even if the lawyer who argued it, Theodore B. Olson, a solicitor general in the Bush administration, won with an approach Mr. Bopp originally left out. (It was Mr. Olson who decided to go after the ban on corporate spending; Mr. Bopp hoped to challenge disclosure rules, which the court upheld last week.)

“I understand that law is art,” Mr. Bopp said. “Picasso, Van Gogh, Michelangelo — they are all very different, but all create masterpieces.”

Mr. Bopp also makes no apologies for his partisanship. A veteran member of the Republican National Committee, he is the leader of a movement to deny party support to any candidate who fails to affirm at least 8 of 10 principles, including opposition to “government-run health care,” “amnesty” for illegal immigrants and “Obama’s socialist agenda.”

Liberal bloggers have ridiculed the proposal as a “purity test.” But that just revealed “what liberals think of ‘purity,’ ” Mr. Bopp said. “We would call ‘purity’ 100 percent, not 80. Marriage doesn’t mean you can commit adultery 20 percent of the time.”

At stake, he said, is the fate of the party and the country. If Republicans fail to restore their credibility with grass-roots conservatives, Mr. Bopp said, “we are going to be facing a third-party effort that will guarantee Obama’s re-election and the literal — not just virtual — destruction of the country as we know it.”

Mr. Bopp’s career as a conservative advocate began in the late 1960s at Indiana University, where he headed its chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, William F. Buckley’s answer to the leftist Students for a Democratic Society.

A few years after Mr. Bopp graduated from the University of Florida College of Law in 1973, a friend in Indianapolis, M. Stanton Evans, introduced him to the state’s chapter of the fledgling National Right to Life Committee. By age 29, Mr. Bopp was its first general counsel, overseeing the dissemination of the 1980 “voter guides” that some said helped elect Ronald Reagan president.

Mr. Bopp’s success defending the voter guides from legal challenges made him the go-to lawyer for right-leaning groups fighting election rules. “He is absolutely tenacious, a bulldog litigator,” said Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, who hired Mr. Bopp to represent it in a legal battle over its guides and political activities.

In 1996, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a fierce opponent of campaign finance laws who is now the Senate Republican leader, helped Mr. Bopp set up his own nonprofit litigation center, the James Madison Center for Free Speech. (Mr. McConnell was its honorary chairman). After Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law in 2002, Mr. McConnell hired Mr. Bopp to challenge it.

Shortly before the Supreme Court hearings, however, Mr. Bopp was dropped from representing Mr. McConnell because of a dispute over tactics with the other lawyers on Mr. McConnell’s team.

The court upheld most of McCain-Feingold in 2003. But Mr. Bopp was soon back, in 2007, with a challenge on behalf of the Wisconsin Right to Life Committee. With Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. having replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, the court leaned the other way, striking down some of the prohibitions on corporate political commercials and setting the stage for last week’s ruling.

Mr. Bopp said the next step in his 10-year plan is to roll back the disclosure rules.

“Groups have to be relieved of reporting their donors if lifting the prohibition on their political speech is going to have any meaning,” he said. Requiring groups that buy political commercials to report their donors is almost as punitive, he said, “as an outright criminal go-to-jail-time prohibition.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 25, 2010, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quest to End Spending Rules for Campaigns. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe